Driver, The (2019) Review

The Driver | DVD (Lionsgate)

Director: Wych Kaosayananda
Cast: Mark Dacascos, Julie Condra, Noelani Dacascos, Jeremy Stutes, Adam Zachary Smith, Charlie Ruedpokanon, Kane Kosugi, Milena Gorum
Running Time: 90 min. 

By Paul Bramhall

The Driver is the final installment in director Wych Kaosayananda’s thrilling apocalyptic zombie trilogy, and no doubt the one that fans have been waiting for! If that sentence has you scratching your head in bewilderment, then the good news is you’re not alone. In fact, the first and second installments have yet to be released. Two of Us, which is the first part, was shot prior to The Driver and is currently in post-production, while the second installment, titled The Rider, hasn’t even started filming. So what’s the deal? Well, most likely thanks to Mark Dacascos being the lead hot on the heels of his role in John Wick: Chapter 3 – Parabellum, it made sense to fast track The Driver. With each movie planned to work as stand-alone stories connected by the same characters and universe, you could almost say the decision makes sense.

After his leading man debut in 1993’s Only the Strong, over the next decade Dacascos was one of the brightest martial arts talents to grace the screen, with many considering Drive, his 1997 collaboration with director Steve Wang and Alpha Stunts, as the best martial arts flick to come out of the U.S. His action career would culminate in facing off against Jet Li in 2003’s Cradle 2 the Grave, however in the 15 years since his filmography has made for increasingly depressing reading, with his most recent roles prior to Mr. Wick dedicated to working with Russia’s self-styled action hero, Alexander Nevsky. For many fans who still hope for Dacascos to return to the roles he was known for in his heyday, appearing as the main foe for Keanu Reeves to face off against in John Wick: Chapter 3 – Parabellum was seen as a golden ticket. Lamentably, if not entirely unexpected, The Driver proves that the ticket in question is already null and void. 

I imagine that for many, like myself, the first twinges of uneasiness came when it was announced Wych Kaosayanada would be directing. Kaosayanada made his Hollywood debut directing Ballistic: Ecks vs. Sever in 2002, then disappeared for 10 years. In 2012 he re-emerged with Angels, a gritty thriller starring Dustin Nguyen and Gary Daniels. In the lead up to its release, the narrative around Kaosayanada was that the disastrous Ballistic: Ecks vs. Sever was never his fault, and that the finished product was drastically altered by the studio. Angels would show us what he was really capable of. Except, it remains unreleased to this day. It was eventually re-cut and re-shot, before being unleashed onto the world in 2015 as Zero Tolerance, an appalling excuse for an action movie. In-between, Kaosayanada hit us with Tekken: Kazuya’s Revenge, which is what watching it felt like – being hit in the face, repeatedly, for 90 minutes.

Normally I apply a 3 strikes and you’re out rule to any director that’s consistently cranked out back-to-back crap, so call it good will towards Dacascos that I allowed myself to go into The Driver with an open mind. The tale of a former assassin who’s now become a family man, the twist here is that the trope is played out against the backdrop of a zombie apocalypse. So there’s your hook, it’s Dacascos vs. zombies! Except he’s made this movie before, when he starred in 2007’s I Am Omega, The Asylum studios riff on the Will Smith vehicle I Am Legend from the same year. I Am Omega was (as are all of The Asylum productions) completely derivative, however comparative to The Driver, with the power of retrospect it’s actually quite fun.

Frankly, Kaosayanada’s latest is a chore to get through, as are every other one of his movies. Adding to the sort of low budget ridiculousness of everything, is that Dacascos has brought on-board his wife and daughter to play, you guessed it, his wife and daughter. Honestly, if my only memory of seeing Dacascos and Julie Condra onscreen together was in 1995’s Crying Freeman (the movie where they met), then I’d have been a happy man. Here they’ve brought their unicorn obsessed daughter Noelani Dacascos along for the ride, and as an audience we can look forward to a montage of them happily eating salad together in slow motion, and other saccharine moments which probably would have been better left on the cutting room floor. 

The plot is woefully underdeveloped and frequently drops the most interesting elements before they’ve even begun. In a nutshell it can be summarised as Dacascos and co. live in a fenced off compound with other survivors of the zombie apocalypse, then one day it’s attacked by a group of bandits (the leader of which brandishes a baseball bat, that feels a bit too much like an obvious nod to Negan, the character from The Walking Dead). Leaving the compound in ruins and overrun by zombies, Dacascos and his daughter escape in their BMW, and head north to find a place called Haven, which is believed to be one of the last bastions of humanity. Cue a relentless number of scenes consisting of Dacascos and his daughter driving (although the ‘driving’ in question has clearly been done in front of a green screen), and occasional run ins with completely unthreatening zombies.

Potentially interesting sub-plots, like the fact the compound is being run like a cult by a religious maniac, and Dacascos’ former life as an assassin, are simply there as lines of dialogue, and are given no further exploration other than the words that are spoken. Other moments are simply bizarre. When it turns out the raid on the compound was an inside-job, Dacascos confronts the guilty party to ask him why he’s sold out, to which he receives the response, “Because you never let me drive!” Ummm, ok. The interactions with the broader group of characters are so stilted, that it becomes a relief once the plot strips itself down to just Dacascos and his daughter talking to each other, the fact that they’re family in reality I’m sure contributing a more natural feel to their conversation.

Exactly what genre The Driver is aiming for is difficult to ascertain, or perhaps more feasibly, the low budget hasn’t allowed for any genre to particularly shine through. Selling itself as an action movie would be setting itself up for failure, as there’s so little of it. Brahim Achabbakhe is responsible for the action direction, and comes with a resume that’s far from shabby – having fought against the likes of Tiger Chen in Man of Tai Chi and Scott Adkins in Boyka: Undisputed, to being a part of the action team on the likes of Ninja: Shadow of a Tear and Abduction. Here he also throws in a screen appearance which allows him a brief scuffle with Dacascos, delivering the only fight scene of the whole movie, with the rest being reliant on pedestrian gunfights.

As a horror it’s even less successful, with virtually no blood-letting, and a scarcity of zombies that results in them never really feeling like a legitimate threat. A zombie movie where the zombies don’t deliver any sense of danger essentially renders itself dead in the water before it’s even left the gates. Without the promise of any action, no zombie thrills to looks forward to, and a plethora of driving scenes that threaten to make even the most patient viewer catatonic, The Driver quickly becomes a journey into monotony and refuses to change gear.

In the closing scenes we’re introduced to a pair of zombie hunting femme fatales in the form of Milena Gorum and Alice Tantayanon, who play the pair that the Two of Us title refers to, before proceedings close with a cameo from Kane Kosugi, credited as The Rider, that the 2nd installment is also billed as. Whether either production will see the light of day is a debatable one, but it’s hard to image anyone getting to the end of The Driver and caring about what happens next, or in this case, what happened before. In the opening line Dacascos states “I need to sleep”, which was a statement I frequently echoed throughout the mercifully short 90 minute runtime. Chances are, if I had, I’d have enjoyed it more.

Paul Bramhall’s Rating: 3/10